 What's up everybody, we're here inside WJCT Public Media on the soundstage for another installment of JME Soundstage Sessions. I'm WJCT Arts and Culture Editor Matt Shaw, and of course we're here recording in Jacksonville, but today we may well want to call it Calford because we have some authentic country music from a very talented group of musicians from right here in our own backyard, Dean Winter and The Heat. They've released two singles already in 2022. They just played the Winterland Music Festival yesterday. We're gonna talk to the band about the momentum that they've been building over the last year or so, but first they're gonna treat us to some of their delightful twang, Dean Winter and The Heat. You guys ready to play a song for us? Yeah, thanks Matt. Take it away fellas. You know I can't escape the rain That was Jacksonville's own Dean Winter and The Heat playing Can't Escape the Rain, a new single from a forthcoming full-length due out in the summer of 2022. We're here at the WJCT soundstage for JME's soundstage sessions and I want to ask you guys about the new music, but first Dean you want to introduce the band to us and tell us who's playing with you. Yeah, absolutely. We got Jack Mock over here on the pedal steel guitar. On the left we have Mr. Jeremy Blanton playing bass guitar and back there on the drums that's Mr. Ty Sullivan. All right well you guys sounded good. You look great. So Dean you put out an EP called Paydirt in 2020 with The Heat behind you, but tell us a bit about your path as a songwriter and how you put this project together. Yeah, for sure. Moved down to Jacksonville in 2008 and just spent some time kind of getting acquainted with the music scene here and made a lot of great friends along the way and was able to write with a lot of people over the years and a few different bands and things like that. Jack and I have been friends for a really long time and we had discussed maybe trying to go a little country, maybe a little alt country, maybe a little Americana and so I started writing some tunes and we got the rest of the guys together, Jeremy and Ty and Jack and myself and we just started kind of jamming on them and writing on them and we're like hey this this feels really good. So after kind of years of writing some music for some other people and collabs with other people and things like that we kind of found at least I feel like I found a sweet spot writing and a sweet spot of guys to hang out with me and do it for sure. Yeah it's really interesting. I'm always interested to hear like how bands sort of arrive at their sound and with country music you know there's certainly divisions between you know different camps of people who will delineate between what's like authentic country or pop country or what have you. There's passionate debates to be had about that but what I really enjoy about your music is you guys the attention to detail on the songs from the lyric writing to the mix of the music, the instrumentation, the guitar tone everything is seemingly on point. Can you tell us about some of the artists country or otherwise you know when you were putting the project together that kind of served as inspiration to help you land at that sound. Yeah for sure and I appreciate that too so thank you. Yeah we there is there's definitely like a like a niche group of country music happening right now that people are kind of latching on to and there's some guys out there like Jesse Daniel and Mike and the Moonpies somebody like Paul Cawthon or something like that that are really driving this neo-traditional country music genre that's happening kind of across the South and across America as a whole but you know even back before that people have been writing and recording this kind of music for a long time so when we started when we started doing what we're doing we kind of set out to try to make it as authentic as possible so kind of what you said and we're mixing all analog and you know we think it sounds really warm and we really like how the songs are coming out so we're really excited about what's coming up but yeah some of those guys and just I mean forever I grew up on 90s country music so that's probably an inspiration in my songwriting and then a lot of the kind of the the new Alton Americana genres that have come up over the years people like Hayes Carl or you know his golden messenger something like that really kind of plays an influence into how these songs come together yeah very cool and you brought authentic microphone stands as well today so yeah so two new songs in 2022 already and we're only about to hit march here but what are the plans for the rest of the year you got more singles coming out a full length yeah we got a couple more singles coming out about a year ago we went up into a mountain and started working on some songs and came out with a full length that we thought was ready you know a group of tunes that we thought could live on a record together and so we've been slowly but surely getting them finished and putting them out so we're hoping to have two more singles out in the next couple months and then to put a full length out this summer we can't wait to hear it Dean winter in the heat thank you so much for being here it's been a pleasure listening to you guys and Dean winter in the heats new singles right on track and can't escape the rain are available on all streaming platforms currently look for a new record later this year uh this has been jamie soundstage sessions part of the jacksonville music experience from wjct public media thanks guys thanks matt